Leadership In The Obama Era: A PR Blitz On The Fiscal Cliff

This is what you get when you elect a community organizer with no executive experience to replace the complete SCOAMF who was in office from 2009-2012

(Washington Post) The White House signaled Tuesday that it will try to marshal the momentum from President Obama’s reelection triumph into another victory at the negotiating table, launching a full-fledged public relations effort to avoid a “fiscal cliff” that could jolt the nation back toward recession.

Administration officials said Obama will hit the road this week for a campaign-style series of events with ordinary Americans, including a visit to a toy manufacturer in suburban Philadelphia on Friday. That trip and others will be aimed at increasing pressure on Congress to reach an agreement on heading off a series of automatic spending cuts and tax increases that are scheduled to begin in January.

The push comes as top Democratic and Republican leaders work to avoid a standoff on the issue, which includes debate about Obama’s insistence that tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans enacted by President George W. Bush should expire.

So, instead of talking with those who are actually negotiating the details of some sort of compromise plan (of course, with Obama, it’s typically “talking down to”) he goes into what he knows best the only mode he knows, that of the permanent campaign. He won’t be putting any ideas, other than “raise taxes, raise taxes, sqwack, Obama want a cracker” (I’m sure someone will find a way to consider that raaaaacist), on the table. In fact, I’m quite confident that he will take most entitlement spending reform off the table.

Obama’s move to mobilize his reelection apparatus for the fiscal debate signals that he intends to follow through on remarks he made during the campaign, when he suggested that major reform required public pressure from outside the Beltway.

“You can’t change Washington from the inside,” he said at a Univision forum in Miami in September. “You can only change it from the outside.”

And since Obama is incompetent except when it comes to campaigning, he’ll hit the road, which gives him a good opportunity to have some great lunches that Michelle’s food agitation program won’t allow school children to have, all while avoiding becoming involved in the hard work negotiating the details. This is leadership in the Obama era: duck responsibility, act as a community agitator, let others do the hard work, put no plan on the table.